Lucy Crowe

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Introduction

Lucy Crowe has established herself as one of the leading lyric sopranos of her generation. Described as having a voice of bell-like clarity with an impeccable vocal technique and powerful stage presence she has performed and recorded with many of the world's greatest conductors. These include Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Emannuelle Haïm, Sir Antonio Pappano, Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Sir Charles Mackerras, Sir Roger Norrington, Edward Gardner, Andris Nelsons, Iván Fischer, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Trevor Pinnock, Mark Minkowski and Harry Bicket. She made her Salzburg Festival debut under Ingo Metzmacher. She has given recitals throughout the UK including London’s Wigmore Hall and made her her recital debut at Carnegie Hall last season.

Her operatic roles include Servilia (‘La Clemenza di Tito’) for the Metropolitan Opera, New York; Susana (‘Le nozze di Figaro’), Belinda (‘Dido and Aeneas’) and Gilda (‘Rigoletto’) for the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden; Sophie (‘Der Rosenkavalier’) for the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich and Covent Garden; Poppea (‘Agrippina’) and Drusilla (‘The Coronation of Poppea’) for English National Opera; Dorinda (‘Orlando’) in Lille, Paris and for the Opera de Dijon and ‘The Fairy Queen’ and the title role in ‘The Cunning Little Vixen’ for Glyndebourne Festival Opera. She made her US Opera debut as Iole in Handel’s ‘Hercules’ for the Chicago Lyric Opera.

Future engagements include concerts with the Orchestre National de France under Daniele Gatti, the St Petersbourg Orchestra under Yuri Temirkanov , and New Year’s concerts with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra under Gergely Madaras. Future operatic engagements include Adina (‘l’Elisir d’Amore’) for the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Dona Isabel (Purcell’s ‘Indian Queen’) for the English National Opera, and returns to Glyndebourne and to the Metropolitan Opera.

"Lucy Crowe dazzles with her every appearance, a young singer blessed with look -at -me- and -listen charisma."THE SUNDAY TIMESThis is for information only. Please contact Sophie Dand for an up-to-date biography.

...soprano Lucy Crowe takes all the plaudits with even the ubiquitous Vilia – a work that is evepresent in these sort of concerts – proving a hit. A hit this might have been, but her performance of two arias by Strauss and Lehar surely must crown her Queen of the Coquette. I don’t think I’ve heard a better On My Lips Every Kiss is Like Wine and her Fledermaus “audition song” was a complete knock-out, acted and sang beautifully. Garry Fraser, Dundee Courier

He meets his match in Lucy Crowe, who chalks up another impressive success as a beguiling but steely Adina. Her light lyric soprano – pliant, silvery, easy at the top – is a perfect fit for music which she expresses with insouciant ease and charm....a ravishing “Prendi per me”, but it’s clearly high time this outstanding British talent was dispatched to Donizetti’s Lammermoor.

Rupert Christiansen, The Telegraph, 19 November 2014

She brings a lovely purity of tone and an alluring stage presence...

Barry Millington, The Evening Standard, 19 November 2014

...Lucy Crowe, who shapes her music as beautifully as we have come to expect from her, and plays for laughs gamely... Erica Jeal, The Guardian, 19 November 2014

But the tenor and soprano steal the show from under his nose...Our own Lucy Crowe is a sparky, coquettish Adina who sings exquisitely.

Tully Potter, The Daily Mail, 21 November 2014

As Adina, Lucy Crowe was adorable. Perfectly cast both physically and vocally, she managed to indicate her uncertain feelings for Nemorino without upsetting the balance of the plot. Her soprano is healthy and uncommonly pure, making for a lovely rendition of the Isolde story and a fizzy first-act duet with Nemorino. Russ McDonald, Opera, January 2015

Lucy Crowe’s was a perfectly acted Sophie, nervously anxious, swept off her feet by her knight, but especially in her look of terror towards the Marschallin in the great Act III finale. Crowe and Connolly intertwined vocal lines seductively in the Rose scene; Crowe’s crystalline purity on the A sharp rising to a B of “Wie himmlische” was sensational, causing goosebumps to prickle. Both were superb in the final duet “Ist ein Traum”…

In the Presentation of the Rose from Act 2 the glorious mezzo of Sarah Connolly as Octavian, combined with Lucy Crowe’s soaring lyric soprano as Sophie, captured the thrill of the blossoming of young love. Barry Millington, The Evening Standard, 9 May 2014

...the artistry she displayed in this set was stunning....She brought astounding clarity and understanding to the music, approaching the free-flowing, stream-of-consciousness phrases with specific intent.

Eric C. Simpson, New York Classical Review, 10 April 2014

Slow, elegantly breathless fragments of phrases passed in a mood that was intimate and luminous...

A sense of majestic scale...came when she turned to the...British songs in the second half, including a lusciously peaceful version of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s “Silent Noon” and a mournfully eloquent “Sleep,” by Ivor Gurney. She sang William Walton’s cycle “A Song for the Lord Mayor’s Table” with energy and the folk song arrangements with easy freedom: “She Moved Through the Fair,” an Irish tune, was a cappella and astonishing.

Lucy Crowe’s stellar reputation had preceded her, but for once, all the raves seemed less than she deserved. This woman deserves to be at the very top of the pantheon of living operatic sopranos, as her performance as the captive Iole demonstrates.

At times, especially in more legato passages, her voice takes on a warm liquidity that positively soothes and heals, but in moments when she is recalling the tortures she underwent, it gives you the sensation of being stabbed with an icicle.

Lucy Crowe, as the prisoner Iole, was correspondingly angelic, sensual and heartbreaking, a woman who sings her first aria, Bright Liberty from under an Abu Ghraib hood, and whose sufferings animate the entire piece. Crowe’s soaring soprano held an entire house breathless time and again during the performance. Robert Harris, The Globe and Mail, 7 April 2014

Crowe is a revelation as Iole, singing her first aria as a subdued prisoner and later becoming a passionate yet tender figure who brings reconciliation to this troubled world. I can’t imagine her role being done better. Jon Kaplan, Now Toronto, 10 April 2014

It was also an ambitious showcase for British soprano Lucy Crowe, who sparkled in every sense (her striking peacock-green dress, finished with gleaming gems, never threatened to upstage her).

Crowe brought sardonic humour to her interpretation of Lutosławski’s cycle of vocal miniatures Chantefleurs et Chantefables (“Songflowers and Songfables”)…Her voice was rich and well-projected in this most spacious and truthful of halls. She is easily the most impressive soprano I have heard in quite some time and the appreciative audience may well have agreed with me…

In contrast to the Lutosławski songs, her role in the Sibelius demanded a much more serious disposition and a good grasp of Finnish pronunciation, which is no mean feat. She was more than equal to these challenges and her voice once more sailed above Gardner’s exciting and sensitive accompanying orchestra.

…Lutosławski’s final song-cycle Chantefleurs et Chantefables (1990) made on its first performance at the Proms two decades and more ago. Since then it has attracted a number of the most gifted sopranos – not least Lucy Crowe, whose delicate though never fey approach to Robert Desnos’s playful verse was engaging and affecting in equal measure…

Lucy Crowe gave a finely attuned account of the demanding vocal part [Sibelius’ Luonnotar], suggesting she may well become one of the work’s leading exponents.

Lucy Crowe’s rapid rise to stardom has seen her acquire an enviable reputation as one of the most sought after lyric sopranos around and her natural, engaging stage presence proved finely suited to the images of plants and animals depicted through the eyes of a child…From the flower songs of La belle-de-nuit and La rose to the antics of the tortoise and the alligator, the delicacy and vocal athleticism of Lucy Crowe was remarkable in a performance that clearly found her many a new admirer amongst the Birmingham audience.If it was a sense of delicate fragility and childlike innocence that Lucy Crowe brought to Lutoslawski’s box of natural delights in Chantefleurs et Chantefables, the contrast with the mysterious, darkly hued tones of Sibelius’s enigmatic Luonnotar could hardly have been more marked.Crowe’s surety of pitch in her highest register allied with the sheer power of her delivery as Sibelius pushes the voice to its very limits in the storm fuelled central climax of his other worldly, Kalevala inspired tale of earthly creation proved magnificent enough, but it was the haunting, uneasy atmosphere of the close that left the audience in Symphony Hall spellbound. The extended silence in the hall as the final ethereal sounds settled spoke for itself.

If everyone, however, had inhabited the music and the role with the imagination and vocal skill of Lucy Crowe’s lovesick Clomiri, the entire evening would have been raised to a different level. Hilary Finch, The Times, 31 May 2013

…Lucy Crowe, the cast’s sparkiest member.

Rupert Christiansen, The Telegraph, 1 June 2013

All the colours we needed were there in the… appearances of the phenomenal Lucy Crowe as fellow virgin Clomiri, in love with Imeneo and strictly superfluous to dramatic need. Less than two weeks after her diva triumph at Göttingen…the delicious nature of her three little arias, Zerlina-charming in their shy or sly sideways glances, their discreet ornamentation. And in the third, Handel gives Clomiri a middle section of sudden and surprising heart; Crowe took us by surprise with the deep musicality and tonal range of which she’s now capable.

The ENO's production of Rossini's The Barber of Seville at the London Coliseum is illuminated by star performances from Andrew Shore and Lucy Crowe, says Rupert Christiansen... Lucy Crowe’s Rosina provided another sort of delight. I’ve long been a warm admirer of this enchanting soprano, but I am now a paid-up fan. She played the scheming, flirting, lying minx to perfection and sang with crystalline tone and fluent coloratura as though it was no trouble at all. I badly want to hear her sing Lucia di Lammermoor.

The star, though, is Lucy Crowe, not as viperish as some Rosinas but with her own very individual ideas about how to embellish the vocal lines. Bright, accurate and vivacious, hers is bel canto singing of a high order.

Crowe effortlessly steals the limelight as a soprano Rosina, with diamantine bravura and a winningly minxish persona…an enjoyable revival, unmissable for Crowe. ENO would do well to book her for any lyric-coloratura roles she wants to sing there.

Rosina is a bright and cheeky Lucy Crowe, whose voice makes short work of Rossini’s fiendish soprano arias. And she does a good line in petulance, pursing her lips while her eyes twinkle with plots to foil the men who scheme around and about her.

Crowe…frequently letting that staggering sound do the work. There was dazzling coloratura in Berlioz's Zaïde, a ravishing sense of line in Xavier Leroux's orientalist Le Nil, and a chaste sensuousness in Gounod's Au Rossignol.

Tim Ashley, The Guardian, 6 January 2013

Lucy Crowe was at her exquisite best in the delicate, tripping consonants of Massenet's Le sais-tu? (Do you know?) and in the pair of Debussy songs, Nuits d'étoiles (Night of stars) and Apparition – together a winning calling-card for Mélisande, which is surely a role she is destined to sing.

Luxury casting of the two supporting female roles
makes them almost an embarrassment of riches. In a splendid Met debut, British
lyric soprano Lucy Crowe brings a bell-like purity to the one aria and one duet
allotted to Servilia.

…embodied in Lucy Crowe’s glowingly sung Vixen –
probably a menace to society and stubborn and stroppy to boot, yet quite
literally a life force.

Rupert Christiansen, The Telegraph, 21 May 2012

Vixen - the super, vibrant Lucy Crowe…

Edward Seckerson, The Independent, 21 May 2012

The action is dominated by Lucy Crowe’s Vixen, a
powerhouse of foxy ingenuity, her tail switching saucily while her light and
easy soprano floats through Janacek’s sometimes treacherous lines. Her
courtship scene with Emma Bell’s Fox is both sexy and funny.

Lucy
Crowe's restless Vixen is a wild child quick to assert her independence.
The lustrous stops this gifted lyric soprano is able to pull out in a
half-animal, half-human kind of courtship, where the earthiness is in the text
and a deeper love-music glows in the orchestra…

David Nice, The Arts Desk, 21 May 2012

…you'll revel in Lucy Crowe's Vixen, whose lament
wrings every ounce of available emotion from the music without remotely
sentimentalizing it; this is a definitive performance, at the level of that of
the unforgettable Helen Field, and there is no higher praise. I've previously
written that the challenges presented by this role are akin to having to sing
Jenůfa and Zerbinetta in the same opera, and Lucy Crowe met them all with
tremendous confidence.

Her bright, bell-like soprano sounds closer, perhaps,
to the old Austro-German school of Gildas – say Hilde Gueden, Erika Köth or
Lucia Popp… Her timbre has more warmth and, after the birth of her baby late
last year, it seems fuller and more penetrating than when I last heard her in
the big house.She had no trouble making
herself heard in the top line of the Act 3 quartet and the even more taxing
(for a lyric soprano) ‘Storm’ trio, holding her own thrillingly against the other
British principals in the cast.

A dramatic collection of solo arias and scenes for tenor drawn for oratorio and opera - some of HANDEL's most lovely music, brilliantly performed by Mark Padmore and The English Concert, led by Andrew Manze. The concluding duet As steals the morn with soprano Lucy Crowe is an added bonus.